After 15 years running the EHRSelector, a free, interactive app for finding an EHR, my partner, Cali Samuels and I want to sell or give it to someone who can help it meet its potential.

What’s the Selector?

The Selector’s idea is simple: Give those looking for an EHR an objective way to find a new EHR that centers on what it can do.

Here’s how it works. You go down an extensive EHR feature list. As you click what you want, it instantly shows which products match. You can then compare them like this: EHR Selector Side by Side.

Here’re its major categories. Each has a clickable feature list. For example, you can choose among 50 medical specialties. We also show which features are HIPAA or MU required.

What’s the Problem?

So, why do we want to sell it or give it away? Simple, we can’t crack two problems. Vendors don’t update their profiles and, consequently, there’s low user interest.

The selector depends on vendors subscribing to it and keeping their product lists up to date. Even though it’s free, we can’t convince vendors to update their information.

We’ve written and called, but we run into several problems. Often it’s impossible to get through to a person. When we do, we get bounced among sales, marketing and technical types. Contacts who we’ve dealt with are often gone and no one knows who can speak to all product features.

Then there’s the connected question of driving users to the site. If our vendor list isn’t up to date, we can’t expect a high user volume. As it is, we get some users who understand that while not everything is current, few EHRs take out features. Occasionally, whole college classes sign up. We’re pleased to serve them, but that rarely interests vendors.

How Does It Make Money?

It doesn’t. For several years, we ran the selector on a subscription basis for both users and vendors. This paid for hosting and maintenance, but the marketing firm that ran it lost interest and it began to lose subscribers.

Two years ago, my partner and I took it back, put on a new home page, added a blog and made it free for everyone. We hoped to get enough traffic to sell ads. That hasn’t worked out. We get a few hundred hits a week, but we don’t have the user or vendor interest to justify ads.

What Are We Looking For?

We would like to turn the site over to someone who shares our interest in an objective, interactive EHR selection tool. Obviously, we want someone who has the marketing clout to get vendors interested.

The Selector’s written in classic ASP. It’s functions work, but it could stand a good rewrite making it more intuitive and less 2001. Finally, we’d love to add a mobile app, user ratings and graphics comparing products.

Sell or Buy?

Cali and I have enough cash and sweat equity in the selector to build a Tesla. It’s never paid, but we’ve been content to run it break even or even at a loss, because we believe it’s an important service.

We’d love someone to dump goo gobs of dough on us for it, modernize it, etc., – are you listening Google? However, we’re realistic enough to look for someone who shares our interest in giving users a useful EHR tool finding tool and who has the wherewithal to carry it on. You can reach me at: carl@ehrselector.com

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The Selector’s Blog

Choosing an EHR/EMR is a hard task. For many years, we hosted the EHRSelector, which we designed to help you pick an EHR by features. It had the most granular feature list on the web. When we were not able to entice enough vendors participation, we closed the system. However, we believe our feature list is unique and useful, so you can download it here: EHR Selector Feature List. We also will continue to write about EHR related issues.